Semi-illiterate peasants like El Principe, Don Neto, El Azul, El Mayo, and El Chapo would not have got far without the collusion of businessmen, politicians, and policemen, and all those who exercise everyday power from behind a false halo of legality. We see their faces all the time, not in the mug shots of most wanted felons put out by the Attorney General's Office, but in the frontpage stories, business sections, and society columns of the main papers. All these are the true godfathers of Narcoland, the true lords ofthe drug world.

Dr John Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is 'the desire to be important' […] This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles, drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children. It is this desire that lures many boys and girls in to joining gangs and engaging in criminal activities.

Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.

Kriger er ikke alltid så ille, for dem som ikke må betale de mest direkte omkostninger ved deltagelse. Fiender er ikke alltid bare en trussel, de kan også være meget nyttige. Fiender forener den annen side, gjør det mulig å endre prioriteter, gjør det mulig å samle all oppmerksomhet om bare en liten del av virkeligheten og å glemme alt annet.

Addiction is any repeated behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. Addiction involves:

1. compulsive engagement with the behaviour, a preoccupation with it;
2. impaired control over the behaviour;
3. persistence or relapse, despite evidence of harm; and
4. dissatisfaction, irritability or intense craving when the object—be it a drug, activity or other goal—is not immediately available.

We can distinguish between two kinds of mind function: awareness (the dispassionate observer) and the jumble of automatic processes (conscious, semiconscious and subconscious) that dictate our emotional states, thoughts and much of our behaviour. One of the first scientists to recognize this distinction was the great Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. “Although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not,” Penfield wrote. “To me it seems more and more reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence from the brain.”

To build a fortress is wrong from the start. Even though he gives the excuse that it is for the city's defense, the castle is the outcome of the ruling lord's personality, and exerts a coercive force on the surrounding area. [...] The act of defense is already an attack. Weapons for self-defense always give a pretext to those who instigate wars.

In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition. The farmer would do much better by growing the food he needs without thinking about making money. If you plant one grain of rice it becomes more than one thousand grains. One row of turnips makes enough pickles for the entire winter. If you follow this line of thought, you will have enough to eat, more than enough, without struggling. But if you decide to try to make money insted, you get on board the profit wagon, and it runs away with you.

When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of a problem, it is generally assumed that the corrective measures will solve the problem itself. They seldom do.

Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create. Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life.

Let no one say that man is the agent of technical progress [...] and that it is he who chooses among possible techniques. In reality, he neither is, nor does anything of the sort. He is a device for recording effects and results obtained by various techniques. He does not make a choice of complex and, in some way, human motives. He can decide only in favor of the technique that gives the maximum efficiency. But this is not choice. A machine could effect the same operation. Man still appears to be choosing when he abondons a given method that has proved excellent from some point of view. But his action comes solely from the fact that he has thoroughly analyzed the results and determined that from another point of view the method in question is less efficient.

Our modern worship of technique derives from man's ancesteral worship of the mysterious and marvelous character of his own handywork.

Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a price continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom. In the modern world, the most dangerous form of determinism is the technological phenomenon. It is not a question of getting rid of it, but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it. How is this to be done? I do not know. That is why this book is an appeal to the individual´s sense of responsibility. The first step in the quest, the first act of freedom, is to become aware of the necessity. The very fact that man can see, measure, and analyze the determinisms that press on him means that he can face them and, by so doing, act as a free man. If man were to say; "These are not necessities; I am free because of technique, or despite technique," this would prove that he is totally determined. However, by grasping the real nature of the technological phenomenon, and the extent to which it is robbing him of freedom, he confronts the blind mechanisms as a conscious being.